Playing the White Option: The Electoral Math for How Trump Can Win

I think Trump’s candidacy came at the eleventh hour, or the last minute, for any possible electoral hope for the White cause in this country. Jared Taylor expressed this thought right after Trump joined the race. The reason for this is that it is really getting to be crunch time on the immigration issue (in Europe as well as the U.S.). The GOP establishment has so far been repeatedly blocked by the grass roots in its efforts to give amnesty to illegal immigrants as part of its Hispanic strategy (i.e., the browning of the Republican party) but this resistance would probably have been overcome with a Bush, Rubio, Graham or Kasich victory, and will be irrelevant with a Hillary victory that includes a Democratic takeover of Congress.

Trump came along in the nick of time to give our people a chance to prevent this from happening. But his success depends on a major triumph based on the “White option.”

During the past decades of massive immigration-driven demographic change it has become clear that the GOP has only two options or strategies for electoral victory – the Brown option based on winning a larger share of the non-White (especially Hispanic) vote or the White option based on winning a larger share of the White vote. The MSM, pundits, think tanks and other organs of the establishment only talked about the Brown option, so that it became a given assumption of the conventional wisdom that couldn’t be questioned. For them the White option didn’t exist. The White option was only discussed in White advocate circles and by outliers such as Steve Sailer and Pat Buchanan at VDare.

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But it seems Trump somehow knew about the White option, and from the beginning clearly based his strategy on it, burning all his bridges to the Brown option behind him, despite his protestations to the contrary. In fact, you could describe his opening salvos as the White option on steroids, which predictably sent the MSM, et. al., into paroxysms of apoplectic indignation.

Trump’s White option strategy was a massive success in the primaries, winning him the nomination, and it looks like he should go into the convention with enough strength and momentum behind him to stymie plans by Paul Ryan and the establishment to control the party platform (especially the immigration and trade planks) and the VP pick. But the ultimate test of the White option will come in the general election, and will succeed or fail based on the extent to which Whites turn out to vote for Trump and the rest of the GOP ticket.

The theory behind the White option is that there are many millions of disaffected White voters who have been waiting for a candidate like Trump to either get them to vote, or get them to switch from the Democrats to the Republicans. There are plenty of signs that this is happening. The question is whether it is happening, or will happen, enough to cause a major political realignment that will transform the electoral landscape.

Clinton’s strategy is to repeat Obama’s 2008 performance by winning 43% of the White vote and 81% of the non-White vote. Trump’s White option strategy is to mobilize a massive White turnout, possibly matching or exceeding the 70% White turnout stimulated by Perot’s candidacy in 1992, and winning a record share of that record White turnout, exceeding Reagan’s 66% record share in 1984. Such numbers should be enough to win the popular vote, and would effectively establish a de facto pro-White coalition that is implicitly opposed to non-White immigration as the dominant force in the GOP.

This issue, non-White immigration, is the primary fault line defining the fracture in the GOP. Economic nationalism or trade policy is a secondary issue, as is military interventionism, but it is non-White immigration, a racial issue, that explains the intensity and invective tone of the establishment’s opposition to Trump. The establishment wants it. The great majority of Whites are in varying degrees opposed to it, and were not supposed to ever have a chance to express that opposition, but then Trump came along and finally gave them that chance, and has ridden the wave of that opposition to the nomination.

But victory in the general election is of course ultimately determined by electoral votes, not the popular vote. Trump would have to win 64 more electoral votes than Romney did in 2012 to get to the winning number of 270. Assuming he won all the states Romney won, he would have to add enough additional states to get to that number from the states Obama won, listed below in order of how much Trump would need to increase his share of the vote to win each state based on the 2012 results, when Romney won 61% of the White vote with a 64.1% White voter turnout.

Florida – 0.9% increase, 29 electoral votes

Ohio – 2.4% increase, 18 electoral votes

Virginia – 2.8% increase, 13 electoral votes

Pennsylvania – 3.5% increase, 20 electoral votes

New Hampshire – 3.6% increase, 4 electoral votes

Colorado – 3.9% increase, 9 electoral votes

Iowa – 3.9% increase, 6 electoral votes

Wisconsin – 4.2% increase, 10 electoral votes

Nevada – 4.4% increase, 6 electoral votes

Minnesota – 5.1% increase, 10 electoral votes

Michigan – 5.3% increase, 16 electoral votes

New Mexico – 7.2% increase, 5 electoral votes

Oregon – 7.9% increase, 7 electoral votes

Washington – 8.7% increase, 12 electoral votes

Maine – 9.1% increase, 4 electoral votes

Illinois – 9.3% increase, 20 electoral votes

Connecticut – 9.3% increase, 7 electoral votes

New Jersey – 9.4% increase, 14 electoral votes

Delaware – 10.1% increase, 3 electoral votes

Massachusetts – 12.5% increase, 11 electoral votes

California – 12.9% increase, 55 electoral votes

Maryland – 14.1% increase, 10 electoral votes

Rhode Island – 14.8% increase, 4 electoral votes

New York – 14.9% increase, 29 electoral votes

Vermont – 19.1% increase, 3 electoral votes

Hawaii – 22.9% increase, 4 electoral votes

Trump claims that the northeast states are in play for him, even his home state of New York where non-Hispanic Whites are now only 58% of the population, and at least a quarter of those are Jewish. With any candidate other than Trump this would seem to be fanciful, but playing the White option Trump has been an over-achiever, constantly exceeding my expectations, and everyone else’s, by a wide margin. A more conventional politician, following expert advice, would probably concentrate all his effort, time and money on the first eleven states where the swing would be less than 5.4%, which have enough votes (141) to give Trump a landslide of 347 and demographics that would make the White option very feasible. If he added just the 80 electoral votes of the first four on the list that would still put him over the top with 286 votes, but it is advisable to play more states than this to leave some margin for possible defeats.

It is clear where we should expect Trump to be doing most of his campaigning, but he has consistently played the White option bigger and bolder than all expectations.